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From The Friend - 24 January 2003
In the Al Zahrawi tea-room in Baghdad, watching Saddam Hussein's army day speech on television, I talked with people at I random, many of whom spoke English. ' There is a strange mixture of tolerance, faith and defiance. They said that, twice now, world opinion has predicted that Iraq would collapse - after the Gulf war in 1991, and in 1998 when 350 cruise missiles hit the country. Once again they will survive. Yes, their children are afraid. Yes, teenagers doubt if it is worth studying. No, they will not go to the shelters when the bombing starts. They talk not so much of US or UK aggression but rather of 'Bush and Blair': they do not resent the people of the countries about to bomb them but the leaders. Professor of microbiology Hoda Ammash said, 'People here bear every respect for western people and western civilisation. We respect your technological advancement, and your values. We know that westerners are being given the opportunity to learn about Arabic civilisations. Yet hatred is being manufactured, by some, to engineer a clash of civilisations.' I was reminded constantly of previous fact-finding missions in China and in the former Soviet Union. Minders everywhere, walls with ears, people afraid to mention let alone criticise Saddam Hussein, who has indeed modelled himself on Stalin. Yet the group of NGO representatives and former UN officials of which I was part had much greater freedom of access than I expected, including meetings with deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz, foreign minister Nagi Sabri and oil minister Amer Mohammed Rashid, as well as conversations with Iraqis in the street and visits to sites. Everyone I spoke to said they would not use the 34 shelters provided for civilians in Baghdad, because of the 1991 bombing of Al-Amarya shelter when 408 out of 422 women and children in the shelter were burned to death. Iraqi households have been given five months' food rations in advance in order to get it out of the main storage sites where it might be bombed. The food distribution programme, according to Denis Halliday (former assistant secretary-general of the United Nations and UN humanitarian coordinator in Iraq), is one of the most efficient in history, involving 49,000 food distribution agents and minimising corruption through a system whereby if 100 people complain about an agent, he or she is removed. Iraqis are also stockpiling water but have no suitable large containers. People with gardens are being asked to 'dig' wells. Under the UN oil-for-food programme, only about half the oil revenues can be used for buying food and other necessities for the population of the centre and south of the country; the rest is used for compensation to Kuwait and the costs of the UN programme including the weapons inspections. Halliday concludes: 'The 12-year sanctions regime has become a weapon of mass destruction, built on the massive damage to civilian infrastructure by US bombing and resulting in the deaths of over one million people since 1991, over half of whom are children.' According to UNICEF, 25% of Iraqi babies are born weighing 2kgs or less, a key indicator of famine. One million children under five suffer acute or chronic malnutrition. Water-borne and air-borne dust from depleted uranium shells, used by the US and the UK in the 1991 Gulf war, is spreading over vast areas of Iraqbut the government has no way of detecting the direction of the spread because airborne radiation sensing equipment is prohibited. People are developing cancers by consuming meat and milk from animals grazing in polluted areas. Equipment needed for treatment lies idle because the computerised controls have been removed due to sanctions. There is one nurse for every 16 beds where previously there was one for every two beds. Ahmed Fadeh of the Baghdad children's hospital told me there are many cases he simply can't treat because his equipment is worn out or lacks spares, and he has not got the drugs or even the suture thread that he needs because of sanctions. Sarni Al-Araji, a nuclear engineer and director-general of planning at the ministry of industry, is facilitating the work of the UNMOVIC weapons inspectors. Everywhere we went there was a remarkable willingness to cooperate with the inspections, but patience is being tested. During our visit there was a routine inspection near the university of Baghdad where there are six science centres. The inspectors wanted to investigate one of these, but froze the entire complex meaning that nearly 3,000 people could not move for six hours, even though their place of work was not under inspection. This meant that toddlers were left uncollected at nursery schools. Not even the Iraqi ambassador to the UN, there for a visit, was allowed to leave. A professor at the university of Baghdad recounted how inspectors re-examined the university every three weeks, searching minutely. 'They enter exam halls where students are doing their finals and search under their chairs.' We visited the al-Dawrah foot-and-mouth vaccine institute, which was high up in the UK government dossier, published in 2002, of biological weapons sites. Since 1994 the site has been inspected 60 times, it was closed in 1995 when all the equipment was destroyed or removed, and there were cameras everywhere connected to the former UNSCOM monitoring centre in Baghdad. The place was a wreck. Too late perhaps, the Iraqi government has recently introduced key changes on civil and political rights. The special 'security violations' courts, which gave no right of appeal, have been abolished, as have Sharia laws requiring cutting off hands of thieves. There has been amnesty for political and criminal prisoners, which has added to the substantial increase in crime and corruption in the country. Amendments to the constitution are being undertaken to allow for a multi-party system. Exiles not linked to intelligence services may now return to Iraq with the right to criticise the government, and the fee for exit visas from Iraq has been reduced from $200 to $10.
The most electric issue for Iraqis, however, is oil. Current Iraqi production is approximately three million barrels per day (current world production about 77 million barrels) but it has the second largest reserves in the world. If controls were lifted, with infrastructure investment and with its immense reserves of easily extractable oil, Iraq has the potential to supply 10% of the world's oil needs, and to continue to do so for at least a century, since less than one per cent of reserves are being used up each year. Iraqis are very conscious that the US has to import 60% of its oil needs now, going up to 75% in 2010, and conclude that the main reason for military invasion is to gain control of these vast reserves. Iraqi ministers say that if the US were to control Iraq's oil production, it would manipulate the economies not only of the Far East, but also of Europe. Deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz recently told Japanese leaders, 'Today, you buy our oil on business tenps. If the US gains control, you'll buy it on political terms.' Oil minister Amer Mohammed Rashid went further. "The US is salivating, because if it can control Iraq's oil it can control Europe, and that will be the end of Europe's role in the Middle East.' This visit was a shock treatment in learning what it feels like to be an Iraqi. This is an ancient people \vith a civilisation 7,000 years old (Iraqis point out that the United States is barely 300 years old), an economy that until the 1980s was a model for the entire Middle East, and with a free health service that used to be way ahead of the NHS. The streets are now rubble-strewn, most of the middle class has left or been eliminated, and people are selling their household goods on street corners in order to survive. The currency has devalued 6,000% in 20 years; in 1981 one dinar bought three US dollars, today one US dollar buys about 2,000 dinars. To pay a modest hotel bill for six days, you need a pile of dinar notes two metres high. Twelve years of sanctions, which were intended to make the Iraqi people revolt against their leadership, have had the opposite effect, giving Saddam Hussein total control over his people through food rationing. Sanctions have simply disabled Iraqi people through hunger and the wholesale disintegration of their infrastructure. Rather than rebel against Saddam Hussein, they feel defiance towards Bush and Blair. Their leader can constantly reinforce this, since their sense of honour is continuously provoked. The humiliation is very deep and very dangerous. In these circumstances a war and subsequent occupation of Iraq seems precisely designed to fuel the fires of hatred, terror and attacks on the West.
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What can you do? Time is short. The UNMOVIC inspectors are due to report on 27 January. Military preparations indicate that an attack may begin in early February. A pre-emptive attack will be a dear-cut violation of the UN Charter and international law. Medical and public health experts in the UK estimate that between 48,000 and 260,000 civilians could be killed in the first three months of conflict, and that if weapons of mass destruction are used, there could be up to 4 million dead. What can be done to move towards a genuine solution of this conflict other than war and occupation? |
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To report from The Friend, Weekly paper of the Society of Friends [Quakers]
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